About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Sunday, May 31, 2015

Clair Cain-Miller has a series on family-friendly culture in
the workplace (and parental leave) in the New York Times “Economic View”
column, Business "Upshot", p. 4, “The problem with work is overwork: As careers cut into
downtime, family-friendly policies can have unintended results”, link here. The online title is more terse: “The 24/7
work culture’s to on family and gender equality”. She discusses a Harvard Business School study
by Robin Ely.

Does being on-call for production support when you can work
from home online really cut into family life?
My own experience was varied, but some of the people who were most dependable
when called for production nighttime abends were those with several
children. But there were some who
resented the intrusion. There was a tendency
toward the end for single people to deal with more of this. And because the positions are salaried, overtime isn't paid, although comp-time is often taken.

One aspect, however, was downsizing. After a sudden (but expected) layoff at ING
at the end of 2001, the remaining staff was given a much larger on-call responsibility;
one person was suddenly on-call, as the person who had been on for that week
was on the layoff list! Family
responsibility had nothing to do with it!

Friday, May 22, 2015

Zappos (an online shoe vendor) has attracted attention for
removing bosses and job-titles for “self-managed teams”, as in this story on
Dice, story link here. Other
companies that have done this include Valve (a games vendor) and Gore-Tex (a
fabric manufacturer).

Other say that this device provides a hidden layer of
management that encourages bullying.

But back in the 1990s this idea was promoted in “Team
Handbook” as “Total Quality Management”. The idea was presented where I worked
at USLICO while it went through being acquired by NWNL-ReliaStar.

But even Bradford National in the 1970s used the term “Member
of Technical Staff” for all persons on its Medicaid MMIS project, when I worked
there.

But Rachel Emma Silverman has a story in the Wall Street
Journal this week indicating that, at Zappos at least, 200 associated decided
that "Holocracy" wasn’t for them and quit, linkhere.

Contradicting the idea was the story of
one Zappos associate “promoted” to “customer service manager”.

One time, in 1988, I was actually given a “direct report” without
my knowledge. That event can cause
potential legal problems and conflicts of interest, and employers should not
give people titles they did not ask for.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

The Wall Street Journal has an article Thursday by Lauren
Weber, on whether employers are liable for overtime if they require employees
to answer emails (mostly now on company-issued smartphones) off hours, link
here.

The distinction is, of course, whether the employee is
“exempt” (salaried), when he or she is not.
Over time, the Labor Department has tended to narrow its interpretation
of the FLSA. The article gives some good
examples.

Computer programmers who are paid salaries to maintain
in-house applications have typically been regarded as exempt, and not paid for
being on-call. Employers, as a matter of
practicality, often give comp time when associates respond to production
problems. Sometimes they give higher raises.

Tension occurs when some employees are unable to complete
work because of family issues, and other employees (sometimes childless, for
example) take up the slack without being compensated. This is a possible argument against mandatory
paid family leave.

Employees who work under W-2 agreements at client sites for
personnel firms probably would get paid for answering correspondence off hours,
but this would be closely watched.

When employers issue smartphones and laptops or tablets, conflict issues can occur with travel, with personal use of these resources. I've always used only my own resources when on the road (except for a US Census laptop once; on that trip, I carried my own laptop and the Census one, both, but used only my own cell phone.)

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

I got a huge update today from Microsoft on my machines, 40
of them in Windows 8. And it also seemed
that it did not give me the customary two days Restart with Update.

In fact, it offered Shut Down with Update and Restart with
Update. What if I had to make a
flight? I always turn off my computer
and disconnect it (one of them, the HP Envy, is a “desktop” requiring current)
if I leave for a long time. This is not good.

The Malicious Software Removal update takes a particularly
long time in both W7 and W8.

Sunday, May 10, 2015

There’s a back-story to the paid family leave debate, even
among progressive companies that offer it.

Childless workers claim that their coworkers or bosses don’t
think their lives are as “important”. Sometimes they wind up working overtime,
which often goes unpaid in a salaried environment, to cover work for those who
took off time for children. This started
becoming a problem for me in the 1990s;
in the 80s, everyone had been absolutely responsible for his or her own
work. On the other hand, I got a bigger
raise than I would have for the emergency on-calls for others.

The problem got started written about in the 1990s. On a pre-move trip to Minneapolis in 1997, I
remember seeing a Wall Street Journal article by a childless woman working for
a law firm.

Generally, in my own career, most parents got good at working from home and got their jobs done.

The problem bifurcates.
Defenders of mandatory paid family leave point out that it’s a necessary
counter to adjusting to equality by gender in the workplace, from a time when
women stayed in the home. That debate doesn’t consider childlessness. It’s also
true that the fairness problems seem to affect women more than men, in
general.

It’s also true that some women lose traction in their
careers when they have kids. On the
other hand, married men with kids tend to advance more quickly than singles, because
they have more incentive to behave competitively, although there are
spectacular exceptions, especially in tech and entertainment.

Also, more childless people now get involved with eldercare, given an aging population with fewer kids.

There is a problem in logic if an employer has to reassign work to someone else other than the person paid to do it. The other person might not be paid at all (in a salaried environment) or the employer might have to spend more. A childless person could "lowball" those with families and be more likely to survive a downsizing or layoff later.

Thursday, May 07, 2015

Recently Jason Scott (Textfiles) tweeted about job openings
at the Internet Archive, and it’s an interesting link. Are these jobs in San Francisco of the Bay Area?

Archive includes the “Wayback Machine” which gives a record
of what websites looked like I the past.

My first website, “hppub.com”, was set up in 1997 and kept
until summer 2005, when everything was moved to “doaskdotell.com”. I can still
see what the content looked like “way back” in the past.

The name “hppub” has been reused since (for a while by an
online casino), and it seemed also that when this happened, the wayback
mechanism didn’t work for a while. But
it works now.

Conceivably, forensics could look at archives to see what
people posted in the past, and this could be done with job applicants, although
I haven’t really heard of it being searched very much in practice (whereas
modern social media sites are often checked).
People can have archives removed (as just search engine results can be
removed).

It still amazes me that this group has enough space for the
entire akashic record of the Web. First picture above is "hppub.com" on March 25, 2002 (after a major update), and the second is at the end of 2002 (after another restructuring).

Monday, May 04, 2015

Here is a little more history on the instability I
have with the HP Envy desktop.

I needed to submit an amended return on state income
taxes. I brought up the HRBlock PDF of
the tax returns and went to the printing panel and specified only the pages for
the state return, and changed the default “One Note” to “Brothers printer”. When I tried to print, the machine froze on
0% printed.

I pressed the power button and got the machine to
force-restart and brought up the PDF again.
I tried to print the entire document, and the machine seemed to freeze
again. But this time, when I hit the power button, it started blinking and
printed three pages. I hit the power
button (on the computer, not the printer) again and it printed the rest of the
document. Then the computer worked
normally. I went ahead and restarted it
properly from the Windows 8.1 desktop power options anyway.

Normally, I can print Word and other PDF’s (like movie
tickets) without incident. Something seems
to be different about the way HRBlock
formats its PDF’s. Somewhere, between
Hewlett Packard firmware, Windows 8.1 (both with many updates), and Adobe there
is a coding problem. Maybe another update
from HP or Microsoft would fix this. I
haven’t tried this on a Toshiba, that
would take time to set up.

The events log shows here:

“The server {1B1F472E-3221-4826-97DB-2C2324D389AE} did
not register with DCOM within the required timeout.”

“The server {BF6C1E47-86EC-4194-9CE5-13C15DCB2001} did
not register with DCOM within the required timeout.”

Saturday, May 02, 2015

Well, May Day starts out with a somewhat Maoist view of the
job market. I went to a larger 7-11
yesterday, and saw a desperate-looking “Help Wanted” sign, for someone to work
the graveyard shift from 11 PM to 7 AM Friday nights through Monday
nights. It sounds like the most
undesirable shifts possible, in one of the most dangerous (from exposure to
crime) minimum wage jobs. Actually, I
don’t know that it was minimum wage – the night shift would need supervision,
too.

This is the real world that the rest of us depend on. They used to say, a convenience store or especially fast-food place is where you find out "if you can work."

Of course, the IT world, with social media companies and
everything online, is much more a 24x7 employment world that it was when I was
“working”, and when operations was considered “proletarian”. Systems programmers, though, had to work a
lot of weekends to do upgrades (like to new levels of CICS). And, when working for Univac back in the
1970s on benchmarks in St. Paul, I remember the all-nighters in Eagan.

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